SCHOOLS WHERE 11-YEAR-OLDS CAN’T READ AN EASY SENTENCE

About one in five non-immigrant children in some primary schools in inner-city areas leave at 11 unable to read simple sen­tences, the author of a new report on education priority areas warned yesterday. The difficulties of immigrant children are even more marked.

“There is a disturbing concentration of children with very low levels of attainment in certain inner-city primary schools,” says the author, Mrs Joan Payne, of the Department of Social and Ad­ministrative Studies, Social Evaluation Unit, Oxford University.

Her claim is based on a study of vocabulary and reading sur­veys carried out in 44 primary schools in poor, run-down areas of Deptford, Birmingham and Liverpool and two mining villages in the West Riding. She found that, so far as vocabulary tests were concerned, the older the children, the worse their scores in re­lation to national standards.

In London, for instance, compared with the figure for all London primary children, the Educational Priority Area children had read­ing scores between two and five points lower. And those children dropped progressively farther behind as they grew older.

She found that such schools are staffed to a large extent by young teachers in their first job since leaving college, and that their depar­ture to take up more attractive posts elsewhere creates a constant problem of staff turnover.

Most of the parents, even though they themselves had received a minimum of education, were ambitious for their children, but believed it was the school’s task rather than theirs to see that the child was able to get a good job.

Mrs Pyane also found that most of the teachers in such schools appeared to be more permissive, more tolerant to noise and less approving of physical punishment than teachers in other schools.

Although the idea of physical punishment is not encouraged in college training, she found that the position is quickly4abandoned in the classroom.